De Waal Quotes & Sayings

The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species. — Frans De Waal

We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It's all about security, social companionships, and a full belly. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: 'We haven't yet solved the problem of God,' the critic yelled, 'and you want to eat! — Frans De Waal

Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. — Frans De Waal

This book [...] demonstrates something we had already suspected on the grounds of the close connection between apes and man: that the social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true. — Frans De Waal

I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century. — Frans De Waal

There are many reasons for kindness, and religion is just one of them. — Frans De Waal

Japanese things - laquers, netsuke, prints - conjure a picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow. — Edmund De Waal

Sultan would first jump or throw things at the banana or drag humans by the hand toward it in the hope that they'd help him out, or at least be willing to serve as a footstool. — Frans De Waal

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species. — Frans De Waal

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause. — Frans De Waal

When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor. — Frans De Waal

To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit. — Frans De Waal

From an evolutionary perspective, nothing could be worse for a male than to eliminate his own progeny. It's assumed, therefore, that nature has provided males with a rule of thumb to attack only infants of mothers with whom they have had no recent sex. This may seem foolproof for the males, but it opens the door for a brilliant female counterstrategy. By accepting the advances of many males, a female can buffer herself against infanticide because none of her mates can discard the possibility that her infant is his. In other words, it pays to sleep around. — Frans De Waal

I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie's stories. — Edmund De Waal

And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into the house, into the room, into their lungs. Someone is being beaten in the street below. What are they going to do? How long can you pretend this is not happening? — Edmund De Waal

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it. — Frans De Waal

The term 'alpha female' originated in my field of animal behavior, but has acquired new meaning. It refers to women who are in charge, for example, by flirting and dating on their own terms. It is also used maliciously for a loud-mouthed, controlling woman who has no patience with deviating opinions. — Frans De Waal

Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally. — Frans De Waal

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food. — Frans De Waal

Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring. — Frans De Waal

[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more. — Frans De Waal

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us. — Frans De Waal

The original form is the contagion of fear and alarm. You're in a flock of birds. One bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to wait and see what's going on. You take off, too. Otherwise, you're lunch. — Frans De Waal

When people fuck with you, you gotta choice. You can fuck back or swallow down. Swallow down enough times and you start to choke. Or you can learn to accept. Let go. Breathe easy. — Kit De Waal

As far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation. — Frans De Waal

Imagine you're a writer, and you have decided to offer your readers a firsthand account of the politically correct primate, the idol of the left, known for its "gay" relations, female supremacy, and pacific lifestyle. Your focus is the bonobo: a close relation of the chimpanzee. You — Frans De Waal

Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world. — Frans De Waal

En route to such trees and get up before dawn, something they normally hate to do. — Frans De Waal

The label derives from comparative psychology, the name of a field that traditionally has viewed animals as mere stand-ins for humans: a monkey is a simplified human, a rat a simplified monkey, and so — Frans De Waal

Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree. — Frans De Waal

Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way. — Frans De Waal

Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful. — Frans De Waal

Socialism cannot function, because its economic reward structure is contrary to human nature. — Frans De Waal

A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks. — Frans De Waal

It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch. — Edmund De Waal

On August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. — Frans De Waal

The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically. — Frans De Waal

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures. — Frans De Waal

The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing. — Frans De Waal

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes. — Frans De Waal

There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors. — Frans De Waal

Neuroscience may one day resolve how planning takes place. The first hints are coming from the hippocampus, which has long been known to be vital both for memory and for future orientation. The devastating effects of Alzheimer's typically begin with degeneration of this part of the brain. As with all major brain areas, however, the human hippocampus is far from unique. Rats have a similar structure, which has been intensely studied. After a maze task, these rodents keep replaying their experiences in this brain region, either during sleep or sitting still while awake. Using brain waves to detect what kind of maze paths the rats are rehearsing in their heads, scientists found that more is going on than a consolidation of past experiences. — Frans De Waal

Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal. — Frans De Waal

But surely the simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth.17 — Frans De Waal

Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals. — Frans De Waal

Ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species. — Frans De Waal

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction. — Frans De Waal

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists. — Frans De Waal

Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs. — Frans De Waal

Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves. — Frans De Waal

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. — Frans De Waal

Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions. — Frans De Waal

Perhaps it is not love that motivates effective altruists but empathy, the ability to put oneself in the position of others and identify with their feelings or emotions. Writers like de Waal and Jeremy Rifkin have seized on the idea of empathy as, to use de Waal's words, "the grand theme of our time."4 Rifkin believes that civilization has spread the reach of empathy beyond the family and the community so that it covers all of humankind. — Peter Singer

There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial. So, — Frans De Waal

There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something. — Edmund De Waal

Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them? — Edmund De Waal

The initial animosity between divergent approaches can be overcome if we realize that each has something to offer that the other lacks. We may weave them together into a new whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts. — Frans De Waal

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord. — Frans De Waal

When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know. — Frans De Waal

It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life? — Frans De Waal

It wasn't God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to. — Frans De Waal

I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits. — Frans De Waal

Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia's findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism's needs. — Frans De Waal

House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces. — Edmund De Waal

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, ... a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion. — Frans De Waal

But the Dashnak Hairenik Weekly was merciless. Quoting the accounts of a few escapees, it depicted Soviet Armenian as a locus not just of economic misery, but moral degradation: Godlessness, Atheism, Immorality, Robbery and perpetual spying on one another! There is not a trace of our family sanctities left there. Having repudiated the idea of the existence of a God, the Bolshevik ignores every conception of family standards, every moral principle, every social order. Aram's wife or watch equally can belong to Hagop, Ali, or Stalin. There is no conception of nationality. A Kurd, a Caucasian, a Georgian, or a Turk have the right to become your son-in-law when they wish it. They have the right to divorce the very next day.26 — Thomas De Waal

Our northern brethren buried their dead, were skilled toolmakers, kept fires going, and took care of the infirm just like early humans. The fossil record shows survival into adulthood of individuals afflicted with dwarfism, paralysis of the limbs, or the inability to chew. Going by exotic names such as Shanidar I, Romito 2, the Windover Boy, and the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, our ancestors supported individuals who contributed little to society. Survival of the weak, the handicapped, the mentally retarded, and others who posed a burden is seen by paleontologists as a milestone in the evolution of compassion. This communitarian heritage is crucial in relation to this book's theme, since it suggests that morality predates current civilizations and religions by at least a hundred millennia. — Frans De Waal

If two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior are likely the same, too. The alternative would be to postulate that, in the short time since they diverged, both species evolved different ways of generating the same behavior. — Frans De Waal

The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It's good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn't mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn't mean that genes actually are. Genes can't be any more "selfish" than a river can be "angry," or sun rays "loving." Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are "self-promoting," because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves. — Frans De Waal

American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11 — Frans De Waal

One cannot master set research tasks if one makes a single part the focus of interest. One must, rather, continuously dart from one part to another - in a way that appears extremely flighty and unscientific to some thinkers who place value on strictly logical sequences - and one's knowledge of each of the parts must advance at the same pace.15 The — Frans De Waal

True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. — Frans De Waal

I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38) — Frans De Waal

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later - or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy! — Frans De Waal

Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives. — Frans De Waal

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock. — Frans De Waal

Would we have evolved the same technical skills and intelligence without these supremely versatile appendages? — Frans De Waal

Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account. — Frans De Waal

Course, and were part of his life with Jiro. — Edmund De Waal

Werner Heisenberg put it, "what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal — Frans De Waal

The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice. — Frans De Waal

Females avoid conflict. They are afraid of violence. The males, on the other hand, are less averse to strife. But once conflict breaks out, the males are much better at reconciling. In a study done in Finland, children who had quarreled were asked how much longer they intended to be angry at one another. The boys proudly said: "Oh, at least one or two days." The girls said "forever". — Frans De Waal

Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity. — Frans De Waal

The qualities that I have seen successful people in HPOs posses: unbridled passion and enthusiasm. — Andre De Waal

Other primates, of course, have none of these problems, but even they strive for a certain kind of society. In their behavior, we recognize the same values we pursue ourselves. For example, female chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males toward each other to make up after a fight, while removing weapons from their hands. Moreover, high-ranking males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community. I take these hints of community concern as a sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and that we don't need God to explain how we got to where we are today. On — Frans De Waal

The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as "anthropoids" (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape's kiss "mouth-to-mouth contact" so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth's gravity a different name than the moon's, just because we think Earth is special. — Frans De Waal

Propulsion, spewing out smoke, and three-wheeler taxis, — Edmund De Waal

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities. — Frans De Waal

There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. — Frans De Waal

I describe in 'Chimpanzee Politics' how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side. — Frans De Waal

Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative. — Frans De Waal

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. — Edmund De Waal

Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The — Frans De Waal

Elephant altruism on the Kenyan plains. With her tusks, Grace (right) lifted the fallen three-ton Eleanor to her feet, then tried to get her to walk by pushing her. But Eleanor fell again and eventually died, leaving Grace vocalizing with streaming temporal glands - a sign of deep distress. Being matriarchs of different herds, these two elephants were likely unrelated. — Frans De Waal

Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication. — Frans De Waal

Ultimately these battles are about females, which means that the fundamental difference between our two closest relatives is that one resolves sexual issues with power, while the other resolves power issues with sex. — Frans De Waal

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There — Frans De Waal

Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than [it's] given credit for. — Frans De Waal

People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others. — Frans De Waal

Following rules is, of course, the reason the dog is man's best friend is because the dog follows rules, and they actually do experiments on that, is that how well certain breeds of dogs follow rules, and how much they internalize them. And so many hierarchical animals, obviously they follow rules. — Frans De Waal